Forbidden Swooning & Sexual Alienation

I'm sitting here with an essay about R.D. Laing, Freud & Charcot, hypnosis, alien abduction, science and imagination, and social hysteria swirling around in my head, and words are kind of spilling out of my ears all over the floor and I keep tripping over them and watching the dog skid across the kitchen floor on all the loose punctuation and stuff so... while I grapple with my Pam-thinks-too-much demons (and the essay), I thought it would be cool to just post some artwork.

The first image (above) is of Charcot hypnotising a female 'hysteric' around the turn of the century (from 19th to 20th) for an audience of scientists and physicians. What tools those guys were!

This is what R.D. Laing and Thomas Szasz said in so many words: that those guys were major tools.

Anyhoo...

Next we have Tobor the Great (representing mechanistic science and logic and so forth) with a similarly swooning beauty. Tobor is starting to rattle humankind a bit... I mean, the robot is out of control and worse, he wants our wimmin!

Like most men, Tobor the Great has 'every human emotion" (see top of poster), but not the slightest clue how to handle said squishiness. I mean, eeuuuwww.

But what he can do is make really dishy blondes faint and carry them off to...well, we don't know yet, but he can sure carry them off, huh?

These alien intelligences continue to carry off our wimmin until the situation approaches meltdown, as illustrated in a later poster.

They are now triggering RAW PANIC! and worse, they are about to TARGET EARTH!

Something has to be done about this, right?

Something IS done about it, and pronto!

Now we have human men carrying off swooning women again. (Whew!)

But seriously, is it enough?

What if, what if, what if this thing that wants our wimmin isn't robotic at all? What if it isn't symbolic of hardware headed science nerds who can't remember their wedding anniversaries and still think women are, eeeeuuuwww...gross!

What if, instead of that, it's really bug-eyed aliens carting off our swooning gals?

Oh the creeping horror of it all!

In such a situation, it is indeed hard to know how to proceed.

It might be a good idea to start by asking the girls themselves. I mean, how do we know they aren't asking for it? You know how girls are.

But they don't speak science!

How can we ever get to the truth about this alien invasion when the humans closest to it are devoid of legitimate language?????

Luckily, some tools who were pretending to practice neurology back in the late 19th century found a way to neutralize the inherent gooiness of the female race and to get at the truth by telling these females--rendered harmless by the old hynotic gaze of course--what the truth is.

Thank God for Freud!

Seriously, you can't be asking GIRLS what's going on without first telling them what's going on, right? That would just be cruel and unusual.

Anyway, to cut to the chase, it turns out that what is going on is that aliens are abducting and making hanky panky with our wimmin.

This has been going on for awhile.

This makes the women they are making hanky panky with quite mad. (How could it not? I mean, it's disgusting, right? We have no idea how much goo is involved in such activities, but it has to be really, really super-gross.)

Luckily, we do now have a way of keeping tabs on these nefarious activities...Yes, that's right...

Abductee Betty Andreasson under hypnosis

Hypnosis!

By rendering the victims immobile and dreamlike, we get at the stunning truth of the matter (and if we sell tons of paperback books and get invited to conferences by doing so, hey, is that our fault? Is that wrong? A guy has to eat, right????)

OK, I'm done being a smart ass.

(For now.)

All I'm saying is, we might get more interesting answers about alien abduction if we asked more interesting questions.

Also, we might get more interesting answers if the popular books posing the questions had cool pictures like these.

Yes I will write my boring ass essay. I promise.

But this is the internets, you know.

If I'm going to write academic blather and use big words I must first atone with pop graphics and an appropriate amount of snarky commentary.

You might want to skip my next post. 

Pam & Rocky Get Buzzed by a Black Helicopter

So I'm walking my dog out at Asylum Lake Nature Preserve, over by the prairie, and along comes a HUGE black helicopter, flying low enough for me to see that it has no markings.

It flew past us, then circled back, hovered right over us, circled again, hovered again, and then took off slowly to the west.

It would be cool to imagine this had something to do with UFOs, but I think it had to do with some National Guardsman learning to fly a big Chinook helicopter and wanting to check out a big Alasksan Malamute trotting alongside the prairie.

Have you seen this dog?

Later, driving home from our walk, I saw the helicopter parked at the National Guard amory.

Tons of cars were parked by the side of the road checking it out. I don't know what was going on, but it caused a small stir in the neighborhood.

Chinook helicopters are HUGE. (So are Malamutes.)

I am still all tingly over having this X-Files moment, right here in Michigan.

The truth is out there, kids.

Let me know if you find it and I'll blog about it.

Are You Paranoid Enough?

Back when I was an undergraduate psychology student (about a hundred years ago), our Abnormal Psych professor told us that every year a significant percentage of paranoid schizophrenics were discovered to have been telling the whole truth and nothing but the truth all along.

In other words, they really were picking up radio signals with their tooth fillings, or were followed by creepy government agents who knew their every move, or were stalked by unknown malevolent others who wanted them dead.

At which point the psychiatric hospital would update their charts and release a report that said, "Oops."

Ha, ha. No not really.

Psychiatric hospitals don't apologize!

Crazy people do regularly turn out to be telling the truth though, which brings me to a point I keep meaning to make in this blog and keep putting off because it makes my head hurt.

In a nutshell (so to speak), the point is this:

In a sea of conflicting disinformation, the most compelling disinformation, the disinformation that seems the most 'out there', the most disinformed if you will, is always the truth.

Every good con man knows that the best place to hide is in plain sight--the trick is to set up the situation such that the truth is indistinguishable from bullshit--not that hard to do, really, if you make the effort.

So here's how that gambit goes with UFO stuff: lie, story, lie, delusion, delusion, lie, truth, lie, delusion, story... Hey! That sixth explanation is BONKERS!

Can you believe someone actually believes that?

The U.S. government has been messing with the minds of ufologists and others since the late 1940s. Are they really covering up some kind of alien agenda?

I'm thinking, no. I think they started out trying to deflect public attention away from the atom bomb, discovered how effective it was to mess with people's heads that way and how broad the applications were, moved into various 'Shock Doctrine' psy-op experiments that yielded creepy good results, and now, having done all that experimentation, have gotten to be experts at keeping us all talking about utter nonsense 90% of the time while they continue whatever dasterdly crap they are up to these days for whatever dasterdly reasons.

So when I'm looking at UFO stuff, I always think to myself, "Which of these things is not like the others?" Where in this mess of weirdness is the paranoid schizophrenic telling the bald truth?

Because he's there all right.

He's probably monitoring my thoughts right now.

Are You An Alien? (Or Just Alien-ated?)

Recently I responded to an internet post about the U.S. economy. I don't do that very much anymore (for reasons that will shortly become obvious).

This time it seemed safe.

It wasn't.

My response was fairly bland, general and dispassionate (for me), citing a book I read recently about how industrial jobs have been slipping away from the U.S. for the past 30 years while the financial sector has grown enormously.

I wasn't saying industrial jobs should come back or that banks are evil or anything like that (although sometimes I do think both things), I was just stating what most people of most political persuasions see as basic statistical fact. As in, Ok, this is what's been happening here for awhile.

Within minutes someone showed up with an essay length post in which I was called a Lou Dobbs fanatic (I'm not even a fan!) and was told how wrong I am about everything and how misguided. Then, this person proceeded to make all the same points I just made along with suggestions for changes that would help the U.S. economy.

In other words, s/he was agreeing with me and attacking me at the same time.

That happens so much anymore on the internet that it's barely even interesting to mention it, but I thought I would mention it in this context because it strikes me how anxious we are to define ourselves by how we are different--or better still, opposed--to others, even when we aren't!

It's as if we need to find an area of opposition to exist as a unique human being, even when there isn't one.

Every time we define ourselves by what we are not (not a liberal! not a conservative! not poor! not rich! not sick! not lazy! not you!), we choose to disregard who and what we are. We choose to disregard our common experience as human creatures and our shared thoughts as persons among other persons in favor of standing out as a solitary, unique individual.

Recently I saw a PBS program about magic and psychology that made the point that in order to perceive an object or event, human beings don't just focus on that object or event and passively ignore what else is going on.

No, what human beings do reflexively in order to perceive is actively suppress the background in order to absorb and define the figure. This active suppression of the background is also the perceptual mechanism that allows a magician to perform illusions and sleights of hand.

The surprising fact is, magicians do much of what they do in plain sight. They understand that we're looking over there while unconsciously blocking out over here. So they do what they do over there, in plain sight, and we don't see it.

We can't help it. It's how we are made.

It's clear to me human beings do the same with who we think we are. We focus on what what we are in opposition to others, while actively suppressing everything else. We do this order to feel like a separate individual, which is a really big deal in our culture.

The result?

To some degree, we end up alienated from ourselves and others, and this perceived separateness becomes abrasive and dysfunctional, even painful.

Last but not least, consider this:

If a stage magician can learn to do things in plain sight without being seen by simply understanding human perception, what else might also understand human perception and lurk in the corners of consciousness we actively ignore?

These are my rambling thoughts on a Tuesday afternoon--shared on a blog I've been severely neglecting for some time, mostly due to a terrible case of writer's block and a sense of having no opinions whatsoever on anything at all.

Seriously, I'm detoxing from opinions and blah blah. I'm sick to death of even my own opinions and don't give a rat's ass about them anymore. I don't know anything and I don't think anything, but if I can shut up long enough, I do see the world as constantly amazing and stranger than fiction at every turn.

It's not a bad place to be, right now, that one. It feels like coming home. But I'll venture out again soon.

See you in space.